[Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

> The core of Wikipedia culture is battleground: fight vandals, nuke their
> articles, whack them and quick! Yes, it is important for the integrity
of
> the encyclopedia. Yes, spam was prophesied to be the end of Wikipedia.
But
> what will surely kill it is lack of participation. And we are killing
the
> participation by whacking it with deletions, clean ups, bans, etc.
> 
> We have to make a profound choice in the culture here:
> 1) we continue with the whacking and scaring the newbies away (content
> priority #1, people #2), or
> 2) we embrace the newbies and we let some spam through (people priority
#1,
> content #2).
> 
> So far we are steadily moving along the first route. I believe, it is
time
> we switch the priorities. People are important. It's the people who will
be
> creating content in the future, and not the other way around. Wikipedia
> will
> inevitably fail without participation. And content... we are already the
> largest and the best...
> 
> Renata

To me it sounds too much black and white. Indeed, there are points you
better not stumble across as an editor: engaging into battles over disputed
content (like Middle East conflict), writing articles on smth with disputed
notability, pushing POV or not getting immediately the image upload rules.
But I assume this is a relatively minor fraction of editors (though of
course it still represents a problem). I can not recall that I ever got any
templates in my articles (I have written over 500 of them since 2007),
except for a couple of times from a bot that there are no links to the
article, and that I ever got any angry comments from admins/other editors
concerning the articles I have written. The only serious problems I got was
when several trolls started to request a source on every word in two of my
articles, and this had nothing to do with the quality of the articles, but
with me being a sysop. So I believe the problem exists but is grossly
exaggerated (though for someone who has to fight for the notability of
his/her only article it may very well be the most serious and grave
problem).

Cheers
Yaroslav